From the Episcopal Church: eHymnals

Church Publishing Incorporated (CPI), now has Episcopal Church hymnals as digital editions for iPad® tablet readers. The eHymnals now available are:

Soon to follow is:

  •  Wonder, Love, and Praise, A Supplement to The Hymnal 1982.

These eHymnals all offer a Table of Contents complemented by complete hyperlinked index, and fully searchable content by author, tune name, and title.

“Electronic books are becoming fully integrated now within the Church, so we’re meeting the needs of our customers with a variety of digital products,” said CPI’s Davis Perkins, Publisher.  “In addition to an already significant assortment of web-based  resources, including our RiteSeries Online, plus hundreds of CPI titles available as Kindle, Nook, and Google eBooks editions, the eHymnals demonstrate our commitment to delivering important content for the Church via every available channel.”

“The eHymnals are intended to be faithful renditions of the printed pew editions,” said Br. Karekin Yarian, CPI’s project manager – eProducts. “These ebooks are graphics intensive, containing the musical settings for each piece of music in the print edition.” He said that accompaniment and leaders’ editions will be available at a later date.

Church Publishing, Inc. is the publisher of official worship materials, books, and music for the Episcopal Church. Their publishing imprints include Church Publishing, Morehouse Publishing, and Seabury Books.

Editor

Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., edits the blog, Pray Tell: Worship, Wit & Wisdom.

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Comments

11 responses to “From the Episcopal Church: eHymnals”

  1. Jordan Zarembo

    Thanks to Church Publishing for taking this initiative. I have tried, often without success, to compress the various Roman Rite missals onto an e-reader. Professionally programmed renditions of print materials often incorporate very desirable features into the digital text in a seamless fashion. I find the zoom function particularly important, as I find some hymnals and missals tiring to read even with near-perfect vision correction.

    The next step in hymnal, lectionary, or missal e-publication is the ability to synchronize the day’s liturgy between parishioners, the celebrant/presider, and the cantor or choir. This is especially important if a church celebrates a local commemoration or feast on a particular day. The day’s liturgy could be tailored for the particular celebration and made available for download. Given the widespread access to wifi points these days, one day parishioners might be able to take out their tablets and download the day’s liturgy right before the celebration!

    The emerging academic field of Digital Humanities might benefit contemporary church e-publication. The move to digitize and hyperlink classical and late antique source texts might also benefit the digitization and development of an easy-to-use but efficient user interface for digitized liturgical books.

    Reply
    1. Simon Ho

      I would prefer it if they could download it well before the Liturgy. Some of us do prepare in advance.

      But maybe I’m old-fashioned, I still prefer a nice book with gilding and nice pictures…

      Reply
    2. Jordan Zarembo

      re: Simon Ho on March 1, 2012 – 6:57 pm

      I agree that the ministers of the liturgy should be prepared. Nevertheless, perhaps sometime in the future “on-the-fly” downloads would be available for visitors who would prefer to use a digital tablet to follow along during the liturgy. The difficulty with this model is copyright. The transition from codex to digital tablet is fraught with many legal issues.

      I don’t think that digital tablets will completely replace the codex in Catholic worship or Christian worship in general. I agree with you Simon that digitized text cannot compete with the beauty of illuminated codices. The possibility of creative expression through illumination is one reason to celebrate Mass from altar missals.

      Hymnals, hand missals, and missalettes are often of a utilitarian nature, with printed illustration or even no illustration at all. Pew prayerbooks and sheet music are great candidates for digitization as they are not, at least in the Roman Catholic tradition, strictly required for the celebration of Mass but nevertheless useful for participation in the liturgy.

      Reply
  2. Brigid Rauch

    On the plus side – the choir could read the music when the church is in darkness such as during portions of the Easter vigil.

    On the minus side – how would choir members be able to make notes on their music?

    Reply
    1. Matthew Geerlings

      I believe there’s an app called iannotate for 10 bucks that allows for this. Perhaps the future will see us replacing the choral folder with Ipads or other like devices?

      Reply
      1. Brigid Rauch

        If it saves some of the juggling, I’m all for it!

        I’ve often seen choir directors photocopy music as it goes out of print and they need extra copies. It would ease a lot of consciences if people could pay to download extra copies.

    2. Audrey Seah

      A choir director once told me his experience with a choir that used nothing but iPads at their concert. The backlight illuminated all their faces, making them look like ghosts when the lights were dimmed…

      Reply
  3. M. Jackson Osborn

    NO, NO, BR!!! The juggling is part and parcel of choir culture, an exciting concommitant of festal services. Juggling while remaining calm, efficient and musically focused is the mark of every well seasoned, veteran chorister who never misses a beat or a note. Surely, you shouldn’t want replace such mastery with an ugly, soulless chunk of technology??? Would you???

    Reply
  4. Tony Ward

    Imagine the Roman Missal on an iPad, and the number of hernias this would prevent….

    Reply
  5. Thomas Strickland

    MJO, seriously, I agree with you (somewhat); part of our ministry as music leaders.
    I have long advocated having monitors in choir music racks, controlled by the director. No more “what page are we on,” “what does it look like,” or “do we sing the harmony here,” when only the correct page of the correct piece-with parts not to be sung obliterated-will show. But then this takes away some of the fun mentioned above.
    I wonder if the eProduct edition of the supplement Wonder, Love, and Praise will rectify the page-turn problems in this disastrous layout (which includes page turns in many two-line hymns!).

    Reply
  6. Audrey Seah

    I downloaded the trial copy of the H1982 a couple days ago on my iPad through iBooks and was rather disappointed. I’m curious to see if anyone else has downloaded the hymnal and what their thoughts are. Here’s my quick review:

    The hymnal index and titles of pieces are searchable but the hymn texts and psalms themselves are not since they are images. Also because they are images, I could not make them larger when I needed to. The printed H1982 already uses pretty small fonts. I normally read the texts fine, but the backlight on the iPad (sepia background) makes it almost impossible to read comfortably. Changing the background to black doesn’t make a difference either, since the background of the images are white. The hyperlinked content pages and the searchability of the index are probably the best things about this hymnal right now, making it no more than a handy reference tool. I was hoping I’d be able to take my iPad to organ practice instead of a hymnal but am quite sure this will not work.

    I suspect digitized hymnals must be redesigned from scratch in order to make them usable. CPI mentioned that the hymnal uses high quality images, but that’s only necessary for print — if an image cannot be enlarged, the quality of the image only needs to be as good as it can appear on screen. A redesigned hymnal (in contrast to a fancy version of a scanned one) should utilize musical fonts (instead of single images) so font sizes can easily be changed and Hymn texts can be searchable. A melody search similar to the one hymnary.org has may even be possible. Because this isn’t a printed book, layouts are not limited to the space a page has as well — if a hymn is long, one may decide that scrolling is better than “flipping” a page.

    Reply

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